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eepcat: Coder application


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A message from eepcat, of ttlg. :)

 

Hello,

If you still have some positions available for beta mapper, I would like to help out and design a map with Dark Radiant. I'm currently finishing up my sixth DromEd mission for the Masters of Horror contest. I have an idea to create a small sized tomb mission utilizing whatever trap types are available with the mod, in hopes of it serving as a demo/tutorial. I will be able to start working (learning) within six weeks.

 

I also have an good set of audio tools for my own custom ambients (FL Studio, CoolEdit Pro). I will certainly be developing my own ambients for my missions and would certainly make them available to the mod if there is any interest.

 

Thanks. You taffers are doing great work.

- eepcat (Paul D Rotter)

 

Link to eepcat's missions.

 

http://www.rotterware.us/thief/thief.asp

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Sounds good to me. We have plenty of tomb-based resources, and (thanks to greebo) traps. :)

 

And a how-to tutorial sounds great.

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Hello All,

Eepcat here. It would be a great priviledge to contribute to this effort. I have been a member of TTLG since 2001 and have authored five missions with DromEd. I've also worked with Game Studio (A4/A5) and the Morrowind construction set. GtkRadiant is a sweet editor and I look forward to working with a more intuitive and user-friendly editor.

 

I am a computer programmer for an aerospace company (though I actually work on systems for yachts...go figure!). I offered my coding skills back in August, but RL issues ended that rather quickly. Mission designing is much more accomodating to the tides of real life, so I know that this is something I can make a solid contribution to.

 

The Thief series is one of only two game series' to cause complete obsession (the other being SSI's AD&D Gold Box series circa 1988). This effort is a great way to keep the spirit of Thief alive while moving in a new direction using modern tools for modern hardware.

 

I'm currently finishing my FINAL :rolleyes: DromEd mission for the Masters of Horror contest.

I'll post some screenshots from recent missions later tonight or (probably) tomorrow.

I hope to put togther a mission that serves as a well-documented tutorial on traps (unless someone beats me to it, of course).

 

I have a patched Doom3; I've used Subversion before; a cable modem for those big downloads, and lots of patience (thank you DromEd).

 

Please fire away with questions...

- eep!

It pays to be nuts, unless you live with squirrels.

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Hi eepcat, how did you like A4/A5? I was trying it back then (I think it was A3 by then), but I was not very happy about it. I even purchsed the "SDK" (or what they named this lousy overpaid files back then) and soon dumped it. I heard that it has improved a lot, but still. I also tried Beyond Virtual, which I found quite good actually (don't know if you have heard about this). Only problem seems to be that the team is rather small and progress is slow. But at least they are very dedicated to their userbase and a it's a good community. But since I have so much experience gained now with Doom 3, I decided to rather stick with it. After all, if I would do something in another game engine, I would have to learn and port everything over, which would be quite a lot of work, and Doom 3 is still quite capable and flexible. :)

Gerhard

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Hi eepcat!

 

I have no questions except "when can you start?" ;)

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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Sparhawk,

I designed a couple of simple levels in A4, but in the end it served only as a good lesson in level design. I especially enjoyed learning their scripting language (C Script?). It answered a lot of questions I had about AI in 3d games. I then spent about two years trying to find an open source engine (starting with the Wolfenstein raycasting engine) and eventually starting work with Revolution 3D (for Visual Basic back then). I started working on a sewer racing game when I started work on my first Thief FM...I have stuck with DromEd since. I realized that developing a complete game is a team effort, and recruiting a team is awfully difficult when you don't have any real credentials...so game Mods were a better choice.

Knowing that most of the members of this community are TTLG vets, I know that it will be an open community with a passion for the Thief world.

- eep!

 

Hi eepcat, how did you like A4/A5? I was trying it back then (I think it was A3 by then), but I was not very happy about it. I even purchsed the "SDK" (or what they named this lousy overpaid files back then) and soon dumped it. I heard that it has improved a lot, but still. I also tried Beyond Virtual, which I found quite good actually (don't know if you have heard about this). Only problem seems to be that the team is rather small and progress is slow. But at least they are very dedicated to their userbase and a it's a good community. But since I have so much experience gained now with Doom 3, I decided to rather stick with it. After all, if I would do something in another game engine, I would have to learn and port everything over, which would be quite a lot of work, and Doom 3 is still quite capable and flexible. :)

It pays to be nuts, unless you live with squirrels.

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Hi eepcat!

 

I have no questions except "when can you start?" ;)

 

By mid-June I should be free of DromEd forever....mu ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

- eep!

It pays to be nuts, unless you live with squirrels.

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  • 9 months later...

Cool. :)

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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One of the mistakes I made the first time around was trying to jump right in and getting something compiled. This time I'd like to get a "bird's eye" view first, then get familiar with the code.

 

As I see it (and please correct where I'm wrong), the Dark Mod is three main parts:

1. DarkRadiant - level editor based on open-source GTKRadiant

2. Game/physics/graphics engine based on open-source Doom3 engine?

3. Custom resources pack (textures, objects, ai, etc).

 

Source code for 1 and 2 are in a SourceForge repository.

Tools required to build:

1. SVN to get the source code (I currently use Tortoise)

2. mingw for compiling/linking

 

Questions:

Is there a development environment that coders are using? Any special project file format? mak files?

Are the files .cpp\.h files?

Could I get a quick overview of how tasks are assigned, submitted, tested, etc?

 

Thanks a bunch - I hope I can start contributing real soon,

- eep!

It pays to be nuts, unless you live with squirrels.

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As I see it (and please correct where I'm wrong), the Dark Mod is three main parts:

1. DarkRadiant - level editor based on open-source GTKRadiant

2. Game/physics/graphics engine based on open-source Doom3 engine?

3. Custom resources pack (textures, objects, ai, etc).

 

Questions:

Is there a development environment that coders are using? Any special project file format? mak files?

Are the files .cpp\.h files?

 

Close, but not quite.

 

We are using the Doom 3 engine and are using its SDK. Doom 3 is going open-source at the end of this year so this is why we chose this engine.

 

The code is normal cpp and h files yes, and most (I think anyway) use MS Visual Studio. There is a solution file on SVN which we compile the SDK with and pack it into a pk4 (which is openable with winzip etc).

 

Hopefully that helps clear it all up :)

 

As for assigning tasks etc, I believe Spar would be the one assigning programmer tasks.

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Doom 3 is going open-source at the end of this year so this is why we chose this engine.

 

I don't think that's going to happen this year. The engine is supposed to go open source a year to two years after the last commercial game for IDTech4 is released. The new Castle Wolfenstein is slated for release in 2008, so the engine won't be going open source until 2009 at the earliest.

 

 

As for assigning tasks etc, I believe Spar would be the one assigning programmer tasks.

 

Depends on where eep would like to work, Dark Radiant or on the mod itself. :) Oh, Dark Radiant is hosted on source forge...but the mod is hosted on Sparhawks server.

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We also have a bugtracker for keeping track of bugs and features, and who (if anyone) is assigned to solve/implement them. DarkRadiant and the main mod are both tracked there, though I think the main mod stuff is hidden until you get granted the appropriate privileges.

 

As I see it (and please correct where I'm wrong), the Dark Mod is three main parts:

1. DarkRadiant - level editor based on open-source GTKRadiant

2. Game/physics/graphics engine based on open-source Doom3 engine?

3. Custom resources pack (textures, objects, ai, etc).

Yeah, pretty much. Except that the Doom 3 engine is not yet open source, so we're using the open source SDK instead. The SDK contains a lot of Doom 3's code, but not all of it. e.g. It doesn't contain rendering code or internal audio code, among many other bits and pieces.

 

Source code for 1 and 2 are in a SourceForge repository.

Source for #1 is on Sourceforge. Source for #2 is in the darkmod_src repository on sparhawk's SVN server. #3 is in the darkmod repository on the same server. There are also some other repositories for asset source files, extra-hi-res textures, and so on, which you won't need to worry about as a programmer.

 

Tools required to build:

1. SVN to get the source code (I currently use Tortoise)

2. mingw for compiling/linking

TortoiseSVN is indeed the recommended SVN client for Windows.

 

The mod itself is compiled with Visual C++ on Windows (several of us use the free VC++ 2005 Express; others use various paid versions of VC++). I believe DarkRadiant recently switched to VC++ as well. On Linux, both projects are compiled using gcc, as you'd expect.

 

Questions:

Is there a development environment that coders are using? Any special project file format? mak files?

Are the files .cpp\.h files?

For the mod itself: VC++ for Windows. The build tool used on Linux is scons, but you can ignore that if you're not planning to build for Linux. No standard IDE for Linux; I think some people use Eclipse. I use whatever random text editor I have to hand (usually gedit).

 

The files are indeed .cpp and .h files.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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Thanks for all the info. I've been programming with Visual Studio for many years now, so I should be able to get things loaded without much problem. I would like to spend about a week (in RL time) getting familiar with the layout and design.

 

I have the full edition of Visual Studio 2005. Are there any known issues between full and express editions?

 

I'll start with DarkRadiant this weekend. I was thinking about adding a menu item called "Make Really Great Mission Now!". This function would read the mind of the user, execute a series of self-modifying algorithms, and generate the actual output file in less than 40 milliseconds. :blink:

 

- eep!

 

We also have a bugtracker for keeping track of bugs and features, and who (if anyone) is assigned to solve/implement them. DarkRadiant and the main mod are both tracked there, though I think the main mod stuff is hidden until you get granted the appropriate privileges.

Yeah, pretty much. Except that the Doom 3 engine is not yet open source, so we're using the open source SDK instead. The SDK contains a lot of Doom 3's code, but not all of it. e.g. It doesn't contain rendering code or internal audio code, among many other bits and pieces.

Source for #1 is on Sourceforge. Source for #2 is in the darkmod_src repository on sparhawk's SVN server. #3 is in the darkmod repository on the same server. There are also some other repositories for asset source files, extra-hi-res textures, and so on, which you won't need to worry about as a programmer.

TortoiseSVN is indeed the recommended SVN client for Windows.

 

The mod itself is compiled with Visual C++ on Windows (several of us use the free VC++ 2005 Express; others use various paid versions of VC++). I believe DarkRadiant recently switched to VC++ as well. On Linux, both projects are compiled using gcc, as you'd expect.

For the mod itself: VC++ for Windows. The build tool used on Linux is scons, but you can ignore that if you're not planning to build for Linux. No standard IDE for Linux; I think some people use Eclipse. I use whatever random text editor I have to hand (usually gedit).

 

The files are indeed .cpp and .h files.

It pays to be nuts, unless you live with squirrels.

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I have the full edition of Visual Studio 2005. Are there any known issues between full and express editions?

The vcproj file is not very exciting, so there should not be any problems.

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I'll start with DarkRadiant this weekend. I was thinking about adding a menu item called "Make Really Great Mission Now!". This function would read the mind of the user, execute a series of self-modifying algorithms, and generate the actual output file in less than 40 milliseconds. :blink:

Don't be ridiculous, man, that's patently impossible!

 

You'd need at least 50 milliseconds.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi all,

I've spent some time walking through the code...that's a lot of code! Are there any issues/features in the bugtracker that you would like me to look into?

- eep!

It pays to be nuts, unless you live with squirrels.

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You mean the DarkRadiant code? Yes, that's a big baby.

 

How about this one: Issue #341: Copy, Cut and Paste properties.

 

This is a fairly independent task, not too easy, not too hard. And it's unrelated to the current scenegraph refactor, which is currently in the works. What do you think?

 

General question: Do you have access to the DarkRadiant Development Forum?

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I'm not sure about the Development Forum. Could you post a link and I'll find out?

I'm heading off to night schol, so I probably won't get back to you until tomorrow.

Thanks,

- eep!

It pays to be nuts, unless you live with squirrels.

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